Intersectional Feminism
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Intersectionality – Black Feminists and the Uprooting of Kyriarchy

Intersectionality has become a popular concept in social justice activism in the recent years. Many activists, writers, and others concerned with social justice have incorporated this concept, sometimes as an actual working tool in their repertoire, sometimes merely as a label allowing another easy grab at the “ally” cookie jar. This widespread popularity is a positive development, in that looking at the whole kyriarchy[1] is a necessity when the goal is equality and human rights for everyone, not just for your own little social corner. On the other hand, popularity is also beginning to erase the people who developed the concept and the theoretical framework from which it arose, turning it into from deeply critical social theory into a fashionable buzzword.

Intersectionality is not simply the acknowledgment that other people are oppressed too, and that some people are oppressed in several different ways; it is a theoretical framework meant to uproot the kyriarchy by acknowledging everyone’s participation in the kyriarchy as both its victim and its perpetuator. It is, in that sense, literally radical. Intersectional theory is the creation of black women academics and activists who felt ignored and ill-served by both the anti-racism and the anti-sexism movements; it came about from the need of black women to fight for their rights as black women, instead of having to divide themselves up into single-identity bits in support of movements that never acknowledged the way racism and sexism affected them as genuine representations of those oppressions. While the concept is obviously applicable to intersections other than those of race, class, and gender, that is the intersection it evolved out of, and that intersection still provides the best context for understanding how intersectional analysis manages to address the very core of our social systems, unlike many of the frameworks that preceded it.

The two women most closely associated with creating Intersectionality Theory are Kimberlé Crenshaw, for coining the term, and Patricia Hill Collins, for creating the concept of a Matrix of Domination. Crenshaw is a Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, who has worked within the framework of black feminist legal theory and critical race studies[2]. Her work focuses on the way institutions fail women of color as a result of inadequate framing of race and gender issues. In 1989, she wrote a paper criticizing the “single-axis framework” that dominated anti-discrimination law as well feminist and anti-racist social justice work as a framework that discusses gender and racial injustice only as they apply to privileged members of these groups. According to Crenshaw, this perspective not only erases black women and other groups suffering multiple oppressions from the discussion, it fails even at the single-axis job of properly describing and analyzing gender or race oppression, since it focuses on only a small part of the many ways in which racial and gender oppression manifest in our society[3]. She makes her case by citing three legal cases in which black women had sued because of job discrimination. In these cases, black women were told on the one hand that they must prove their case either as discrimination against all women and discrimination against all black people, and on the other that they were too different from black men and white women to be representative of all women or all black people in discrimination cases[4]. Crenshaw points out that a framework in which e.g. gender discrimination must always work the way it does for white women or else not count cannot adequately deal with the fact that black women sometimes experience discrimination similar to white women; sometimes similar to black men; sometimes as double-discrimination, stacking gender and racial oppression; and sometimes, as an oppression unique to Black women, an oppression that is not simply the sum of other oppressions[5]. It is in that paper that she compared oppression to traffic at an intersection, with violence that could come from any direction or all directions all at once. And it is in that paper that she described the kyriarchy as a house with a basement in which the oppressed are stacked, with those experiencing oppressions on many axes on the very bottom, and those experiencing only one kind of oppression standing on top of them, in reach of the basement-ceiling which is also the ground floor on which the un-oppressed stand; single-axis social justice in that metaphor is a hatch in the basement ceiling, allowing those who are high enough to reach it to climb up to the ground floor, leaving those further down (and therefore unable to reach the hatch) behind[6]. Intersectionality on the other hand is meant to be a ladder which would let everyone climb out, leaving the basement empty.

Patricia Hill Collins is a Sociologist and Social Theorist who wrote a number of influential books on the topic of Intersectionality, among them Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990); Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology (2001, with Margaret Andersen); and Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (2004)[7]. It is in the first that she presented the idea of a Matrix of Domination, created by interlocking systems of oppression and maintained, experienced, and/or resisted at multiple levels: the level of our own personal lives; the cultural or community level; and the institutional or systemic level. Collins describes how, because each person is situated in a different location within that matrix, their experience with and knowledge/understanding of the social system will be unique to them; that one of the tools of oppression is the substitution of the dominant perspective and understanding for all other perspectives, erasing and silencing subjugated knowledge and understanding of society; and that resistance to domination has to come from rejecting the dominant narratives as the universal experience of society and instead understanding them as just one of many situated knowledges produced as a result of one’s position in the matrix of domination[8]. Like Crenshaw, Collins also criticized single-axis narratives of oppression in which each person is either the oppressor or the oppressed. She presents the matrix of domination as a system in which people can function as both oppressor and oppressed, and in which systems of racial, class, and gender oppression are always present but not equally salient to each person experiencing them. At the same time, she rejects the idea that oppressions are simply stackable, and points out that playing Oppression Olympics does nothing to undo the systems maintaining the oppressive social systems[9]. Instead, she proposes to focus on the actual means by which the matrix of oppression maintains itself and how racial, gender, and class hierarchies interact within it, by analyzing the three dimensions of the matrix of domination: institutional, symbolic, and individual. The institutional dimension plays out in organizations like universities and social institutions like the education system as a whole, where in general white men still hold the most powerful positions, with white women often occupying assistive or second-tier positions, and women of color largely represented in non-academic job. The symbolic dimension is present in the way we assign concepts into boxes such as “masculine” and “feminine”, and how often these are actually specifically “white, straight, middle class masculinity” and “white, straight, middle class femininity”, and how this ideological sorting of concepts is then used as justifications for why things are the way they are; the individual dimension is the way we ourselves act within the matrix: do we resist them and connect to people who live in very different locations of the matrix, or do we accept the institutional niches and symbolic boxes? How do we manage the differences of power between individuals? etc.[10]

While Crenshaw and Collins are the most prominent black feminists and Intersectionality is generally considered to be their creation, they were not the only or the first to talk critically about the interactions of race and gender and the inadequacy of traditional social justice theories to address them. Toward A New Vision begins with a quote from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, in which she references yet another scholar when she says “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships”[11]. Lorde is also the author of the memorable quote “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”[12] And before ever the term intersectionality was invented, Barbara Smith, feminist author and member of the Combahee River Collective, talked about the “simultaneity of oppressions” which affects black women in unique ways, and which renders white-dominated feminism inadequate to the task of dismantling patriarchy for all women[13]. Meanwhile Crenshaw’s writing refers back to the 19th century, citing in her papers the black feminist scholar Anna J. Cooper, who once wrote “I see two dingy little rooms with, ‘FOR LADIES’ swinging over one and ‘FOR COLORED PEOPLE’ over the other; while wondering under which head I come”[14].

In other words, black feminists have been critically analyzing the multifaceted nature of the kyriarchy for at least a century already by the time the mainstream of social justice activism (white and/or male as it tends to be) even noticed. And now that it has, I see that it has also begun reshaping it, making it once again most useful to those who are most privileged because they are not affected by multiple oppressions. I see it being used in many mainstream social justice spaces in ways that erase the concepts of complicity in the oppression of others with a bland notion of being “in it together”; and that ignore the uniqueness and varying salience of different oppressions to different individuals in favor of universal narratives and claims of one form of domination being the main or root cause of oppression. Just as the great leaders of the social movements are often whitewashed into harmlessness, so Intersectionality is being whitewashed, made palatable to people who cannot stomach the system-shaking implications of radical social justice. This is a disservice to this highly powerful theory, and it is an injustice to the brilliant black women who have created it. Let’s remember and re-learn the roots of Intersectionality and give credit where credit is due. Let’s not weaken its impact and usefulness by trying to cram it by force and distortion into existing social justice narratives, when what it really is is a critique and replacement for single-axis social justice.

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[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy

[2]http://www.aapf.org/kimberle-crenshaw

[3]Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1989). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”. The University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 140, pp. 139-140

[4]Ibid., pp. 141-147

[5]Ibid., p. 149

[6]Ibid., pp. 151-152

[7]http://www.socy.umd.edu/facultyprofile/Collins/Patricia%20Hill

[8]Collins, Patricia Hill (1990). “Black Feminist Thought in the Matrix of Domination”. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, pp. 221-238

[9]Collins, P.. (May 24, 1989). “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” Integrating Race and Gender into the College Curriculum: A Workshop. p. 6

[10]Ibid., pp.7-14

[11]Lorde, Audre. (1984). “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, pp.114-123. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. p.123

[12]Lorde, Audre. (1982). “Learning from the 60s.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, pp.134-145. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. p. 138

[13]Smith, Barbara (ed.). (1983). “Introduction”. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York, NY: Kitchen Table – Women of Color Press. p. xxxiv

[14]Cooper, Anna Julia (1892). A Voice From The South. Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House. p. 96

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Invisible Politics

To politicize something means to inject politics into a previously politics-free subject. "Politics" in this context can mean several things. At the most straightforward, it means connecting a thing to electoral or legislative issues, e.g. using the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to talk about the US-Mexico border in order to convince people to vote for conservative candidates and endorse conservative immigration laws. However, in many cases "politics" means something broader: while gay marriage and non-discrimination laws are political in the above sense, many issues relating to gender & sexual minorities have nothing to do with the government; yet trans and gay visibility are seen as inherently "political". Similarly, not all feminism is connected to legislative or electoral efforts, but feminism is similarly considered thoroughly political. In this sense "politics" and "political" tend to relate to the presence of conceptions about how the word does or should work; it is either used synonymously with "ideological" or to refer to the praxis of an ideology. With that broader meaning, politicizing something would mean injecting any amount of ideology into something that was previously completely ideology-free.

The problem with this is that nothing relating to human interaction is ideology-free. There are only ideologies we notice, and those we do not; similarly, there are invisible and visible politics, but nothing social that is truly politics-free.

At this point, I should clarify what "invisible" means here. Things can be invisible because they fly below people's radar, are rarely encountered, or are otherwise hidden; that is not what I'm talking about. Here, invisibility comes from ubiquitousness: people don't think they and people like them have an accent (it's all these other people who do) because they're acclimatized to it so that it has become their default[1]; similarly, certain assumptions about the world are defaults, and thus normalized and not perceived as even existing[2]. These base assumptions tend to connect up to form entire "naturalized" (as in: "that's just the way things are naturally/normally") ideologies[3].

Default worldviews are just as ideological or political as others, but their underlying assumptions are not usually noticed, i.e. they are invisible; thus, these worldviews are thought of as objective or purely reality-based. In contrast, any alternative view or critique of the default will have noticeable (or even explicitly stated) base assumptions, and will thus be viewed as biased, subjective, or ideological. The introduction of such a critique or alternative worldview into a particular social space would therefore be seen as "politicization" of that space. As noted though, they already have politics in them, they're just politics of the status quo, as imperceptible to us the same way our own local accent is; or the way the grammar of one's own language is followed without necessarily explicitly knowing its rules (i.e. the way young children use & understand it). Feminist critique of video games does not "politicize" them; they already had male-centered politics in them (and some games are explicitly about ideologies and politics *coughbioshockcough*). Shining a light on homophobia in sports does not politicize sports; they already had the politics of heteronormativity in them. Criticizing racial underrepresentation in STEM is not politicizing academia; it has already been full of white-privileging politics, and quite explicitly so until very recently. And so on.

The invisibility of dominant ideologies also means any attempt at making them visible first faces a lack of language to describe the issues[4], and later is likely to be attacked as making things up and playing the victim. It is somewhat analogous to what it would be like to be the first person ever to try to describe English grammar: one would have to unmask and name features no one previously even considered might exist. Reactions by others might also be similar: being the first to claim there are specific rules, patterns, and structures to something people learn "naturally" and navigate fairly well without ever learning any rules for would likely result in the grammarian being accused of making up conspiracy theories about shadowy English-designing cabals forcing people to speak according to "rules".

Lastly, that only the non-default worldview is even identified as a worldview (rather than objective truth) works to the advantage of currently dominant worldviews. "Politics" and "ideology" are both terms with negative connotations in our society. Consequently, being able to accuse critics of "politicizing" or "injecting their ideology into" some aspect of culture or society without risking the same accusation is a useful weapon in defense of the status quo. Similarly, one can accuse critics of bias or subjectivity while being able to claim objectivity for the dominant perspective. This is how it is possible for men to say that they have an objective outsider perspective on gender-related issues or how conservative Christians can connect their religion to the Republican party while at the same time claiming that Islam is different than Christianity because Islam is a political ideology.

None of these attacks are accurate. All social things already have politics in them; all people are biased, subjective, and political, whether that's in favor of dominant ideology or a different one; no one is an outside observer to racial, gender, class, or other hierarchies; there are always social structures even when you don't know about them (just like your own language has grammar even if you've never learned any). The status quo is politics, and it's important to point this out.

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[1] Esling, J.H. (1998). "Everyone Has an Accent Except Me", in Bauer, L. & Trudgill, P. (Editors). Language Myths, pp.169-175. [book chapter]. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam Inc. Retrieved from here.

[2]Olson, D. (Oct 21, 2014). "S4E7 – #GamerGate", in Folding Ideas. . Retrieved from here, transcript available here.

[3]Wemyss, G. (2009). The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging. [book]. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. p.10. Retrieved from here.

[4]Solnit, R. (Jun 04, 2014). "Language Matters: How #YesAllWomen Named a Problem With No Name", Yes! Magazine. [web]. Retrieved from here.

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About Thought Experiments

[content note: non-graphic mention of rape in second-to-last paragraph]

Thought experiments are useful.

Not all thought experiments, not in every form, not on every topic, i.e. not everything someone might call a “thought experiment” is inherently useful, valuable, or worth entertaining. A well-designed thought experiment however can increase understanding of a concept, explore new questions and perspectives, clarify otherwise murky aspects of various issues, and uncover flaws and contradictions in ideas[1].

Probably most important for a useful thought experiment is that something new can be learned through it. A thought experiment needs to present us with a new idea or a new perspective on an idea that lacks the biases of familiar perspectives. For example, there would be little value in re-inventing Maxwell’s demon, because this perspective on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is now well-explored, with much critical as well as supportive work already in existence[2]. A thought experiment on this topic would have to introduce something genuinely novel to be worthwhile.

Thought experiments are also very susceptible to the garbage-in-garbage-out problem: a thought experiment is only as useful as the experimenter’s understanding of a topic. Premises that reflect a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge will lead to faulty conclusions, and so do badly structured experiments. And sometimes, the flawed results can become highly influential, especially when they reaffirm already held erroneous beliefs. Descartes’ rationalist (in the counter-empirical, all-knowledge-comes-from-reason sense[3]) thought experiments stuck the world with Cartesian dualism[4], an incorrect worldview that infests many everyday concepts and many ideas about humans as individuals and as social actors. However, even when thought experiments have no connection to reality by design rather than through ignorance, the output is often garbage, because they are useless. Even though thought experiments are hypothetical and often quite unrealistic scenarios, the specific aspect that is to be evaluated in the experiment needs to be reflective of a real-world issue if it is to be of any use other than to entertain the experimenter.

A last essential feature of a well-designed thought experiment is clarity. Since the value of a thought experiment lies largely in providing new insights, making them inaccessible or muddled is counterproductive. This is especially so in situations where the thought experiment is already addressing a difficult issue that is e.g. very complex, or subject to strong cultural/emotional/intellectual/etc biases. A useful thought experiment reduces a problem to only the salient parts; takes principles, structures, or ideas out of their fraught or biased context and sets them into a new, neutral (because uncontroversial or else completely fictional) context; and/or creates scenarios in which empirically impossible separations of variables might be attempted. One of my favorite examples of a well-designed thought experiment is the Famous Violinist.

The Famous Violinist is a thought experiment at the core of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s essay exploring the ethics of abortion from a perspective that, in 1971, was novel to the debate over the ethics and legal status of pregnancy termination. The beauty of that particular experiment is the way in which it tosses out the cultural and religious ballast attached to reproduction, sex, and the control of female-assigned bodies that makes abortion such an intractable issue. It does so by creating a completely new context for the issue of whether or not a “right to life” supersedes the right to autonomy over one’s body: instead of “woman”, the person is “you”; instead of reproduction, the issue is a fatal illness; and sex is not anywhere in the picture at all. Similarly, it removes needlessly complicating variables from the discussion: by making the dependent dying person an adult with full human rights, the experiment shows the irrelevance of personhood to the issue. The essay also addresses many real-world scenarios and contingencies that follow both from the anti-abortionist conclusion (that right-to-life outweighs right-to-bodily-autonomy), and from the reverse[5]. The Famous Violinist thought experiment brought a new perspective to an ancient argument, it simplified it and removed it from emotionally and culturally loaded contexts, and showed its real-world applications and relevance, making it an incredibly useful thought experiment in moral philosophy.

Incidentally, it also answers the question “Do we discuss the hypothetical intra-uterine poet, or does emotion simply close down the discussion, in either direction?”[6]. We have discussed it already, 43 years ago. The career change from violinist to poet adds nothing to the conversation, so let’s stop beating a very dead horse, especially when doing so hurts those whose rights and bodies are being pontificated upon.

All of this is to say that when e.g. a Richard Dawkins creates a “thought experiment” that is structurally and substantively trivial but for which he purposefully uses emotionally charged examples (which are also factually inaccurate and promote harmful ideas about rape[7]), people will criticize him and his “experiment”. And they will do so not to create taboos, or because they don’t understand its logic, or because they’re emotional. It will be because that specific experiment is worse than useless; it is so trivial it produces nothing of value, while the examples are so toxic they produce harm; it is sensible to reject that.

And doing so is not rejection of thought experiments. Rejecting useless or harmful forms of thought experiment is not rejecting thought experiments in general, not even on sensitive topics. Rejection and criticism of false premises, especially those that are already perpetuated as “common knowledge” despite their inaccuracy; of provocation for the sake of provocation, especially when the target is vulnerable to harm as a result of the provocation; and of endless rehashing of the same point over and over again is not a witch-hunt. It is not censorship, is not creating no-go zones, is not rejection of thought experiments in general. It’s the rejection of a shoddily structured and harmful attempt at edginess that contributes nothing new or valuable to public discourse on any of the topics touched upon.

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[1] Brown, J.R. & Fehige, Y. (2011). “Thought Experiments”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[2] Cohen, M. (2005). Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments. [book]. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 25-27

[3] Blanshard, B. (2014). “Rationalism”, Encyclopædia Britannica. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[4] Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the Existence of God and the Distinction between Mind and Body are Demonstrated. Translation by Haldane, E.S. (1911).

[5] Thomson, J.J. (Fall 1971). “A Defense of Abortion”, originally published in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1(1). [web]. Retrieved from here.

[6] Dawkins, R. (Jul 30, 2014). “Are there emotional no-go areas where logic dare not show its face?”, Richard Dawkins Foundation. [web]. Retrieved from here.

[7] Miller, A.F. (Jul 29, 2014). “Richard Dawkins on Date Rape vs Stranger Rape”, Ashley F Miller. [blog] Retrieved from here.